SOURCE: "The Rogue Pamphlets," in Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, Vol. 1, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1913, pp. 114–139.

In the following excerpt, Aydelotte offers an overview of Greene's "conny-catching" pamphlets and discusses whether they should be regarded as fact or as fiction.

… Robert Greene was as good an authority on London sharpers and conny-catchers as was Thomas Harman on wandering beggars. He wrote five pamphlets describing their tricks…. He had lived among the conny-catchers and perhaps practised their tricks himself in his wild days following his travels in France and Italy. The pamphlets exposing them he wrote during the violently repentant years (1591–1592) just before his death. They show evidence of great haste in composition, and are somewhat haphazard in their arrangement; one of them, The Second Part of Connycatching, seems to have been garbled in the printing, since the paragraphs apparently intended to begin the pamphlet occur somewhere in...